The Hampton Folklore Society (1893-1900)
The Hampton Folk-lore Society was one of the first predominantly African American folklore societies in the U.S. Founded in 1893 at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, the Society collected and published Black folklore in the Institute’s journal, Southern Workman. Taken together the Society’s extensive collection constitutes a vital record and repository of African American folklore. In addition to its vital collection documenting Black cultural practices and traditions, the Hampton Folklore Society, operating in the turbulent years surrounding the legalizations of Jim Crow segregation, represented contested ground in the battle over Black cultural identity and representation. Through its meetings, publications, conferences, and events, the Society became an important site for critical engagement, community collaboration, and the collective preservation of Black folklore.
Hampton Folklore Society members included Black and white students, graduates, and Hampton Institute staff who collected folklore from Hampton, Virginia, and the surrounding areas. Hampton graduate Fred Wheelock served as president of the Society, and Hampton graduate and prominent businessman, Frank D. Banks, served as vice president and wrote what may be the first article by an African American folklorist to be published in the Journal of the American Folklore. Other active members included Robert Russa Moton, who succeeded Booker T. Washington as the second principal of the Tuskegee Institute; Portia Smiley, a graduate of Pratt Institute and Black culinary authority; and poet Daniel Webster Davis. Prominent African American intellectuals and educators, such as Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, William Scarborough, T. Thomas Fortune, and Anna Julia Cooper, also took an active role in the work of the Hampton Folklore Society, contributing folklore materials to the Hampton collection, sending letters of support, and attending Society meetings.
The Hampton Folklore Society disbanded in 1900, after the departure of Alice Bacon, the white Northern educator who had initiated the Society while working at the Hampton Institute. While the Society did not formally begin until 1893, folklore materials from the Hampton Institute had been published in the Southern Workman as early as 1878 and continued to be published in the Southern Workman and the Journal of American Folklore throughout the twentieth century. Its collection of materials marks a foundational contribution to Black folklore studies, and the Society’s work and meetings constitute a dynamic and vital component of late nineteenth century Black intellectual history.
Highlights from the Hampton Folklore Society collection and publications include:
- “Folk-lore and Ethnology.” Southern Workman (from year 1893 – 1901).
- Banks, Frank D. “Plantation Courtship.” The Journal of American Folklore 7, no. 25 (1894): 147-149.
- “Paper [to the Hampton Folklorists] by Mrs. Anna Julia Cooper,” Southern Workman 22, no. 7 (July 1894): 132–33.